Race and Status in Colonial Latin America

Classic and New Reading on Race and Status in Colonial Latin America

by Ann Twinam

Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.

While Morner proposed a more static view of the construction of racial categories in colonial Spanish America, his work is fundamental to understanding where we started.

Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Cope’s work complicates Mörner’s by emphasizing the fluidity of socioracial categories in Spanish America. He suggested that ““a person’s race might be described as a shorthand summation of his social network.”

Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Matthew Restall’s many publications highlight the repercussions of Native and African interactions, a theme less researched until recently.

Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Joanne Rappaport provides nuanced understandings of the complexities of racial construction, exploring how Spanish Americans created their own socio-racial identities. (Reviewed in depth on NEP by Adrian Masters.)